Forget the Steam Deck, this new liquid-cooled gaming handheld has 5x the power

A hugely powerful gaming handheld has just been announced by OneXPlayer, with a GPU that's potentially more powerful than some of AMD's desktop graphics cards. The OneXFly Apex will also have a huge 120W TDP, which gives it access to at least four times more power than most of the portables in our best gaming handheld guide, enabling the AMD CPU and GPU to really stretch their legs.

On top of this, the new OneXPlayer handheld will also sport an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, the first of its handhelds to move on from the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 that has been popular with many brands over the last 12 months. This CPU not only features 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, but it also contains a surprisingly powerful Radeon 8060S GPU with 40 compute units, eight more than you get in the Radeon RX 7600, meaning there's huge scope for gaming at decent frame rates, especially at its maximum TDP of 120W (the default TDP is 55W). Comparatively, the GPU in the Steam Deck only has eight compute units, and an older architecture too - in terms of basic rendering, this handheld could have 5x the power.

There is plenty to digest with the reveal of the OneXFly Apex, including an 8-inch 120Hz VRR native landscape display, but the most interesting spec so far is the 120W TDP, which will reportedly be supported by a "silent sliquid cooling" system.

Having tested a few handhelds that push to either a 30W or 35W TDP, such as the Ayaneo 3 or AOKZOE A1X, it's safe to say that these higher power levels aren't always ideal, especially with limited battery life. The OneXFly is only going to have an 85Wh battery, meaning playing at the highest TDP would result in well under an hour of gameplay. With more power comes the opportunity for the CPU and GPU to boost to much faster clock speeds, and sustain them too, resulting in faster frame rates.

However, the battery is removable, suggesting that higher-capacity batteries may be available either at or sometime shortly after launch, which could support high-power gaming for longer sessions, or at least give you the option to swap over to a second battery when the first is running dry. The idea of a removable battery has already been confirmed as a headline feature in the GPD Win 5, too.

The OneXFly Apex will also support Mini SSD, an easily upgradable storage option that still brings the fast speeds of an SSD but with the swappability of microSD cards.

Whether or not this high-TDP strategy works out remains to be seen, but we'll be following the development of the Apex very closely to see how it fares.

While many of these upgrades are potentially interesting, you won't need a handheld this powerful to play the best Steam Deck games, with some of the best handheld games running just fine on Valve's aging handheld.

Would you want a 120W handheld, or are you happy with gaming at a more reasonable power level? Let us know over on our community Discord server.